


allegory

by marginaliana



Category: British Comedy RPF
Genre: Gen, Mental Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 15:10:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20909684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana/pseuds/marginaliana
Summary: Three friends separately sent John the article with Tony's interview.





	allegory

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this interview with Tony in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/29/tony-slattery-had-very-happy-time-went-slightly-barmy).

Three friends separately sent John the article, two with dribbles of banal text ('You might want to see this' and 'Thought of you') and one with only the link itself, as if the sender had wanted to lay it before him as bare as the subject was.

He read it on his smudged tablet, glasses too far down his nose, a slice of toast balanced in one hand, forgotten until it slipped from his fingers onto the counter among its own detritus. His attention flickered away from the article a moment, then back again, leaving the toast as it was.

* * *

'Bipolar,' they called it, as if there were only two, as if the mind could be divided neatly into equal hemispheres of disaster. The ups and the downs, the manic and the depressive. John had never found them so distinguishable as that. He'd barely found them distinguishable at all. 

It had taken him years to wrap his hands around it, years to build a map of the roles his mind plays. The jester, the murderer, the hermit, the sorcerer, the pale-haired old queer with a box of other people's novels under the bed. Who he was, who he could be.

* * *

One sentence made him reach for his phone (_Almost all his other celebrity chums and hangers-on vanished "when the money dried up"_), then pause. He didn't have Tony's number. Oh, there was _a_ number, certainly, in an old address book in the back of a cupboard. It might ring anyone now.

They'd never been close; friendly, yes, but not intimate. Traveling in the same circles, eating Twiglets in the same green rooms. John had thought nothing of it when they saw each other less and then not at all. 

But had Tony seen him as one of those, the hangers-on?

* * *

They were too similar to be close. Tony had waited to come out until his parents died; that hit close to home. John had thought it noble, once, to keep his own parents from having to be ashamed, from worrying whether he'd become yet another AIDS statistic. 

Now he saw selfishness, a desire to stave off difficult conversations and uncomfortable revelations. And he'd wanted something of his own, something he could hold in a clenched fist and keep.

Had Tony wanted that, too? He clearly didn't now, considering his cut-glass honesty with the interviewer. His reasons for silence were dead.

* * *

It was tempting to make an allegory of it – himself against Tony, two paths diverging from the same stage in the same studio all those years ago. A bit of 'there but for the grace of god go I,' except that it had been a long time since John believed in grace. 

But the mind was more than two poles and they were only themselves, not mirror halves of the same universe. Their differences were not inevitable; John hadn't been given some fairy-tale happy ending.

He could credit himself at least a little for making something that Tony could not.

* * *

He'd managed to keep off coke; perhaps that had been the saving of him. He'd known too many users, some after kicking it, some in the middle still – and worst, the ones just on the cusp of the habit, any habit. Waiting for lightning to strike and bring glory even if it killed them in the end.

John had known he could be one of them, a number in yet another set of statistics. It would have been easy to be dragged down. Maybe _that_ was why he'd never called. 

He couldn't regret it. Not if the price was himself.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Things I Never Told You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21650248) by [Mickleditch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mickleditch/pseuds/Mickleditch)


End file.
